In order to compete with Chrysler’s Airflow in 1934, Gm created the Albanita. They installed an engine that was surprisingly to learn. A Ford Flathead and drivetrain. While it never reached production, it was built and tested amidst Chrysler’s failed production Airflow. It was interesting to see even the H.A.M.B. has never mentioned this model over the years. https://www.motorcities.org/story-o...lbanita-was-a-forgotten-general-motors-design
Very Fiat Topolinoish with a hint of Airflow? https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2007/11/18/sia-flashback-albanita-and-the-ultimate-engine-swap
If I wasn't so tired, worn out and ambition less I would love to have a Topolino with a Iron Duke 4 banger as a daily driver around town. Pat
The Airflow was well under way in 1932 and began production in late 1933. That Albanita looks like a lame attempt to copy the Airflow, as if they had some early spy info on what Chrysler was planning. No way was the Airflow copied off this flounder. Looks like the grille design ended up on the 37 Chev, and it had the crumby Knee Action front suspension that was featured on Chev, Pontiac and Buick for a couple of years. By the way the idea that the Airflow was a failure is pure GM propaganda. Truth is, it was both a commercial and technical success that was copied by practically every car maker in the world. If you doubt this, compare any 1933, pre Airflow car to the 1934 - 37 Airflow, then compare the 1938 models by the same company. You will see that the Airflow is quite different to anything that came before, while every car made after the Airflow looks like an Airflow with chubbier fenders.
I wonder if the so called Ford V8 was actually the similar looking Viking V8 made by Oldsmobile from 1929 to 1931? It would be an easy mistake to make especially in later years when the Viking was long out of production and forgotten.
Excellent point! Was that the same Flathead V8 Pontiac briefly used around that time? This whole story has a very fishy smell to it really, both accuracy and attribution. Ray
Rusty, I think you're quite wrong about the failure of the Airflow. In no way was it a commercial success. It was more expensive to build, had teething problems and customers voted with their feet. Technical success? Eventually. What everyone else copied was the forward engine position, which allowed the back seat passengers to ride inside the wheelbase for more comfort. Styling success? No. The tell is that Chrysler had to keep making the grille more conventional in search of buyers. It also had more turnunder (the curve inward from beltline to sill) than any other maker picked up. I think that the Pierce Sliver Arrow had more effect. One other clue is that when Alex Tremulis pitched the Newport & Thunderbolt show cars to Chrysler president K.T. Keller, he sold them on the idea of redeeming the Airflow's design. So even Chrysler management knew it was not a success. But, to the question of the Albanita, I think it was an experimental car intended to not look like a GM product. It looks like an early British streamlined design clumsily adapted to a larger American chassis. If the Chrysler spies had seen it, they wouldn't have worried about it, let alone rushed back to make their own. The most interesting part about the car is the backbone chassis. Howard Marmon designed a similar one shortly before this and was trying to interest the auto industry in it. The conventional wisdom is that he ran into a wall of "not invented here" indifference. This makes me wonder if GM paid a little attention, or at least saw that the design was a quick and dirty way to test some ideas.
The Airflow was a premium priced specialty car meant to show off the best most modern ideas Chrysler had. It was never meant to be their bread and butter model. That was what the Airstream was for. How many people remember that there were 2 completely different lines of Chrysler and DeSoto cars, the Airstream and the avante garde, premium priced Airflow? Don't forget they launched the Airflow in the teeth of the worst depression the country had ever seen when other luxury car makes were dying all around them. One reason for that was that the Airflow offered room, ride, performance style and luxury for a much lower price than other high priced makes. As for changing the style each year, every car maker did that. The annual model change was de rigeur if you wanted to sell cars. As for the grille being "more conventional" it was anything but. The waterfall grille of 1934 was different from any other car that year and the pointed prow they adopted after that, was different from any car that came before. It only became "conventional" after everyone else copied it. The Airflow had a lot of innovative features. You mentioned the "cab forward" engine and body position. You could add that it had a longer, lower, roomier, wider body and shorter hood than any other luxury make, in other words, more room for passengers and less given to the engine. The revised suspension with long, soft front springs for a flat ride, made stable by an anti roll bar or sway bar. The unitized construction with chassis bolted to the body in a single rigid structure. The first wind tunnel tested streamlined body for smoother high speed operation and better mileage. The all steel body without wooden structural support which GM called unsafe - then copied the next year. The body silhouette which looked nothing like any other 1934 car but which was copied by everyone. The Airflow remained in production for 4 years and was replaced by an improved version of itself with the same overall design owing nothing to the boxy cars of the early 30s. By that time they had proven their point and the public had come around to accepting the Airflow look as conventional. So they dropped the Airflow/Airstream and made a single model which as I said before, resembled an Airflow with chubbier fenders. The myth that the Airflow was not a success was propaganda spread by GM who was scared to death of the Airflow because it made every car they had obsolete. They copied the Airflow features as fast as they could then all of a sudden their "Turret Top" all steel models were the best and safest, where they had claimed just a year or 2 earlier that only a wooden framed body was any good. If I wanted to be cruel I could point out that GM had some premium priced models too, like the Cadillac V12 and V16 models. What a flop they were! When introduced in 1929 they said they would limit sales to 5000 a year. What a hope. They built that dog for more than 10 years and never sold 5000 of them the whole time. It was never a commercial success, and started no trends. In the end it was quietly dropped while they kept on with their 8 cylinder models that were more like the Airflow.
Rusty, It's clear that you are passionate about the Airflow. I don't think anyone disagrees that they were innovative. The question becomes: "Why didn't they sell?" But first, a little background (which I assume you already know, but bear with me.) From its inception through 1933, DeSoto was positioned just below Dodge. For 1934, Chrysler repositioned it just above Dodge. The Airflow, which was intended to be a DeSoto exclusive (and its only model) was a key element in that rebranding. Walter Chrysler liked the Airflow and decided it would be available as a Chrysler as well. It would make no sense to have the regular Chrysler be 'more advanced' than the Imperial, so it was added too. These additions had major implications for the Airflow. Now Chrysler had to make the Airflow in five wheelbases. On a conventional 30s car, lengthening the car meant a simple stretching of the existing chassis, a longer hood and radiator support. On the Airflow lengthening the wheelbase meant redesigning the front third of the space frame with several of the pieces being unique to each length and building new sets of spaceframe jigs for each of the wheelbases, plus bodywork. The Airflow needed five different types of welding and retraining the workforce, which struggled with the new construction. Production officially began in February 1934. It wasn't until about April that the difficulties in the production process were worked out. Many of the first 2-3,000 cars had major flaws. According to a 1932 report by Curtis Publishing (publisher of The Saturday Evening Post, which was the no. 1 publication by automobile adveryising revenues), the high end of the auto market started at $2000. In 1934, the only cars in Chrysler's line that cost that much were Custom Imperials. All of the other Chryslers, including the Imperial, were upper mid-range cars (at $995, the DeSoto was considered a lower mid-range car). So it is wrong to compare the Airflow with luxury cars. Luxury cars, which would have been those high-end cars priced above $3000, made up less than one percent of the market. Cadillac was not intended to make money during the Larry Fisher era (1925-34). It doesn't make any sense to compare the sales disappointment of a car designed with roaring 20s sales assumptions with one designed during the depression. For example, Duesenberg intended to build the J in batches of 500, incorporating enhancements after each batch. We all know how that worked out, but no one calls it a 'dog'. The Cadillac V16 started a trend for high-end car manufacturers to bring out V16s. The depression killed all of them except the Packard pretty quickly. The Airflow was not a success. That isn't a myth and it didn't come from GM. In a year of rebounding sales, DeSoto and Chrysler's sales fell. Chrysler lost a lot of money on the Airflow and it didn't do what it was intended to do. In 1935, Fortune magazine published an article saying that Chrysler's management had thought that customers would gladly pay an extra $1000 for cars noticeably more comfortable than the competition, thus reinvigorating sales of upper mid-level and high-end cars. That they never tried to get the whole $1000 shows just how wrong Chrysler management got it. As for influence of the styling, we'll have to differ. I've already mentioned the Silver Arrow. A Minnesota man named Bergholt was showing his Streamline concept car around Detroit. Bendix had a concept car similar to the Airflow, the SWC, developed at the same time as the Airflow. At Briggs, John Tjaarda developed the Sterkenberg for the Century of Progress exhibition. After modification to make it compatible with Ford manufacturing techniques (and moving the engine to the front), it became the Zephyr. No one copied the signature flat 'waterfall' front of the early Airflow or its fender line. The 1938 Chrysler body is a new and improved version of the Airstream, not the Airflow. Chrysler abandoned the space frame and the unit body. If you have Special Interest Autos #28, read the article 'Created by the Measured Mile'. In it, the creator of the Chrysler Thunderbolt, Alex Tremulis retells how he, and Ralph Roberts of Briggs' LeBaron studio sold K.T. Keller on the Newport & Thunderbolt show cars as a way of erasing "some of the stigma of the Chrysler Airflow" (a condensed version is @ http://www.coachbuilt.com/des/t/tremulis/tremulis.htm). You mention the shorter hood. This was not appealing to consumers. The industry (including Chrysler) had spent three decades making a long hood synonymous with power, and therefore status. The extra legroom that the shorter hood gave doesn't seem to have made an impact on consumer's minds at the time (I haven't seen it mentioned in any period newspaper article about the Airflow). Every account that I can find indicates that the grille was redesigned based on feedback that the car was unappealing. We'll never know what annual model changes might have been otherwise. This leaves the question of the Albanita. We agree that the SIA article's assertion that Chrysler staff rushed back from Milford and did a crash redesign is ludicrous. So, did it have any impact? An alternate theory is that Chrysler employees saw the Albanita at Milford and pushed the introduction forward so that the Airflow would debut first. Other than the notion that they did not want the Albanita to prejudice the public against streamlined design, it doesn't have much merit. It's clear from the photos that Harley Earl would not have signed off on the Albanita for public consumption. What appears to have happened is that, once Walter Chrysler decided that the Airflow would be available on the Chrysler as well as the DeSoto, it was almost inevitable that the Airflow would debut at the New York Auto Show in January 1934 to highlight Chrysler's tenth anniversary. This was a strategic error, because Chrysler didn't have any cars to sell. Not being able to leverage the enthusiasm of early adopters meant that momentum did not build. This, along with the early cars' build problems, was enough to give the Airflow a reputation it couldn't overcome. So the Albanita was, in all likelihood, irrelevant except for it was designed to be: a test bed never intended to be seen by the public.
You seem to think Airflows didn't sell. In fact they sold 55,000 Airflows in 4 years or about 1 Airflow for every 2.5 of the conventional Airstream models. This may not sound impressive until you realize a few things 1) All Airflows sold at a premium price, Chrysler Airflows were all eight cylinder cars (except for the short lived Canadian CY model, a rebadged DeSoto). DeSoto Airflows sold for more money than their conventional counterparts 2) It was introduced during the worst depression America had ever seen, when expensive cars were not selling and many expensive cars of the highest reputation went broke. Marmon, Stutz, Pierce Arrow, Duesenberg, Cord, all disappeared. GM seriously considered dropping Cadillac. In 1934 they brought out a cheaper Olds based LaSalle, while Lincoln and Packard came out with cheaper models as well, the Zephyr, Packard 120 and 110. 3) It was never meant to be a best seller. Walter Chrysler wanted to celebrate the Chrysler car's 10th anniversary with a new model as sensational as the first one had been in 1924. He instructed his engineers to pull out all the stops and make the most advanced car they could. He knew it was going to be too avante garde and too expensive for a mass market product which is why he continued the more conventional Airstream models. Why would it surprise you that the public buys more cheap cars than expensive cars? At the same time Oldsmobile was making six cylinder and eight cylinder cars, no one called the Olds eight a flop for not selling as well as the Olds six. You could draw the same parallel with any company that made both six and eight cylinder cars, like Studebaker, Nash, etc. Why is Airflow the only expensive car considered a failure because it did not sell as many as a cheaper car? And, I still insist every car made after the Airflow was more or less a copy of the Airflow with chubbier fenders. All you have to do is compare any 1933 car (pre Airflow) to its successor 5 years later. You will soon see that the Airflow resembled no other car that came before it, while every car that came after it resembled the Airflow. You are correct that no one calls the Duesenberg a "dog" even though they failed and went out of production the same year as Airflow. Same with the Cadillac V12 and V16. Lack of sales success did not affect the merits of the design. Neither started any design trends or had any permanent influence on the industry. Yet somehow the Airflow is considered a failure even though it outsold both those cars put together and influence every car made afterwards. You mention the Pierce Silver Arrow. A magnificent custom built car no doubt, and an early attempt at streamlined bodywork. But it was built on a standard Pierce 12 chassis and its proportions show it. It is far from the efficient packaging of the Airflow and from a practical standpoint gives a far less roomy body in a far larger, heavier more expensive car. Chrysler abandoned the space frame and unit body. There may be some subltleties here that you have missed. Previous to the Airflow, cars were built on a chassis with frame rails up to 7" deep, with bodies made of metal panels nailed to a wooden framework. The chassis frame was entirely independent and the body did not contribute any strength to the overall structure. The Airflow all steel body was designed as the structural strength and rigidity of the whole. This influence carried over into the more conventional designs. After the Airflow you had cars with a chassis only 3 or 4 inches deep, tied to the all steel body with 8 rubber isolated body mounts. This allowed the body to stiffen and strengthen the somewhat flexible chassis , while isolating noise and vibration. It also allowed the cars to be made on a conventional assembly line. There were a lot of new innovations to the Airflow design that were disparaged by competitors - while working feverishly to copy them as fast as they could. The designer of the Lincoln Zephyr admitted that he copied the Airflow, while insisting he improved on the original. I'm not sure why it is important at this late date to pretend the Airflow was no good. It seems obvious that it had a great influence and made cars more comfortable and practical, if less "classical" in looks. It seems funny that every auto executive and designer recognized it at the time, even if they denied it strenuously in public.
@Rusty O'Toole .........Excellent dissertation! In a much lesser way, this narrative about the Airflow being a ‘failure’ is similar to the same claims about the Edsel. Most certainly, the Edsel, unlike the Airflow, was not a groundbreaking car in any way. But the popular claim of the Edsel being a market failure is more false than common ‘wisdom’ comprehends. First and foremost, the Edsel was introduced in the midst of a steep recession which saw total car sales shrink substantially. In that context, the sales of the Edsel were quite competitive as expressed in market share percentage it captured. But the decline in total sales of vehicles made those numbers unprofitable and changes had to be made to stem the losses. The controversial styling, I believe, contributed to the image of ‘failure’, a matter of perception rather than reality. By the way, I am not an Edsel fan, just pointing out the similarity of factually unsubstantiated public opinion. In any case, I commend you on a very well written objective review of the Airflow based on it’s own merits, and the context of the times. Ray
The Edsel was another story. To understand the Edsel you have to understand its place in Ford's sales and marketing strategy at the time. In the early fifties medium priced cars, and deluxe versions of lower priced cars, became best sellers for the first time. One year Buick actually outsold Plymouth, even though Plymouth was one of the low priced 3 and Buick near the top of the medium priced field. This is where Ford had a problem. Chevrolet had been outselling Ford since the Model A days and in 1942 Chrysler passed Ford in sales. This in spite of the fact that they sold twice as many Fords as Plymouths, but Chrysler was very strong in the medium price field, their Dodge, DeSoto, and Chrysler six cars being very popular while Generql Motors offered, in addition to Chevrolet, the Pontiac, Oldsmobile and Buick with Cadillac at the top of the range. Ford had the low priced Ford, the medium priced Mercury, then nothing till you got to Lincoln. This meant in the fifties if a loyal Ford man wanted something nicer, if he didn't happen to like the Mercury they had nothing to offer but a Lincoln, a much more expensive car. And there was a good chance he would buy a Dodge, DeSoto, Oldsmobile, Pontiac or Buick. So, in the early fifties they began planning a revised corporate structure. This involved keeping Ford as the low priced offering, moving Mercury up market to compete with Buick and Chrysler instead of Pontiac and Dodge, make the Lincoln a full blown luxury car and fill the gap between Ford and Mercury with a new car. They tested thousands of names and boiled the list down to 4 - Ranger, Pacer, Corsair and Citation. Then out of the blue Henry Ford decided to name the new car after his father, Edsel Ford. Nobody liked the name, it meant nothing outside the older generation of Detroit auto men, but when your name is on the factory you get to call the shots. Ranger, Pacer, Corsair and Citation became models of Edsel. The first 2 being the smallest and lowest priced Edsels, based on the Ford platform and corresponding to Pontiac, Dodge and Olds 88 while the Corsair and Citation were built on the larger Mercury platform and sold against DeSoto, Chrysler, Buick and Olds 98. Lincoln which in 1953 was closer to an Olds 98 or Chrysler Saratoga moved up market to Cadillac, Imperial and Packard Patrician territory. It was sheer bad luck that the Edsel was launched in late 1957 just as the country was entering a serious recession. Auto sales were down across the board and medium priced cars were hardest hit. Olds, Chrysler, Buick , etc sales were way off. In the period 1957 - 1961 such well established medium priced cars as Hudson, Nash, DeSoto and Packard hit the wall while the economy Rambler became a sales sensation, soon to be joined by other compact cars like Studebaker Lark, Ford Falcon, Plymouth Valiant and Chevrolet Corvair. Edsel never stood a chance. Not that it was a bad car although it had nothing special to offer but a few novelty features but because it was the wrong car at the wrong time. Lead times being what they are, there was no way to know that when they began planning the Edsel that the country was going to run into a recession 3 or 4 years later.
Very interesting dissertation on the Air Flow and Walter P. Chrysler. I did a paper many years ago on that subject and got a good grade if I remember correctly. What was said about the Air Flow not selling due to its innovative design is true to a point but the depression was the driving factor for its appeal by the public. Same with the Edsel and the recession during its short life. Both cars were innovative in their own right and at the time they were introduced Amazing how now every car built today incorporates the unibody design. Great discussion and reading.
The Airflow did what it was supposed to do, which was to give Chrysler a special premium priced car of advanced design to sell and establish their reputation for superior engineering with the public. It was made for 4 years which was rather a long time to make a single model in those days. The car that replaced it was much more similar to the Airflow than to any conventional pre Airflow design but as they now made no other model, they didn't need a special name. It served its purpose and the lessons learned from it influenced new car designs for many years. Too bad its reputation was tarnished by a barrage of bad press from competitors who were scared to death of a car 5 years in advance of anything they had to offer.
Henry II was actually against naming the Edsel after his father. They looked at over 6,000 possible names but the final decision was made by Ernest Breech at a board meeting at which Henry II was not present.
I wonder if the sales figures were kept on the age of the buyers for the airflow and the Edsel. I think that would tell a lot.
I don't know that they kept that kind of statistic in 1934 but the Airflow was aimed at the upper medium priced buyer with avante garde tastes or an engineering background, or at least an appreciation for technical progress. It was also attractive to former luxury car buyers who found the Airflow offered room, comfort, ride, and performance similar to the luxury models at a much friendlier price. Edsel's market was "the young executive on his way up" according to Ford's marketing experts. The modern, space age middle class college educated status seeker aged 25 to 45. In the 50s it seemed like everybody was going to join the middle class and "executive" was the latest buzz word.
Innovative at its time and was as has been stated, "the young executive on his way up". The Chrysler push button and even GM's Corvair automatic broke new ground as to what the manufacturers would engineer. All broke ground and the Corvair platform was where GM was heading with it's car lines. Imagine no chevelles, camaros and SS cars, not pretty for the GM purist. That is what GM and their engineers and top executives saw as the future so for them to execute Ralph Nader for killing it off he actually probably saved GM and he didn't even work for them. Hindsight can be 2020 especially when foresight is blind.
Lots of revisionism on this thread. I want to deal in facts. The Airflow was intended to be the 1934 DeSoto alone and its only model. It was intended to move DeSoto above Dodge in the Chrysler lineup. Walter Chrysler decided that it would also be a Chrysler, to celebrate Chrysler's 10th anniversary. Fortune magazine reported that Chrysler management intended that the Chrysler Airflow would reinvigorate midrange sales. It did not. Midrange sales on the whole were up 30% over 1933 sales. Chrysler was up only 10%. DeSoto fell 41%. Only Plymouth's banner year saved Chrysler Corp. It took until April for the Airflow to reach full production, but Chrysler cut production in May because the Airflow was not meeting sales projections. And 1934 was the Airflow's best year. All of this is well documented. Engineeringwise, the Airflow was an advance. Designwise, it was not well received. And that is putting it mildly. Saleswise, it was a disappointment to Chrysler's management. That ushered in an era of technological and styling conservatism at Chrysler that it did not break free from until the mid 50s. Most of what are attributed to it as starting industry design trends are merely accelerating existing trends. The 1937 Chrysler Royal was a revised 1936 Chrysler Six. Same with the Imperial. The styling through-line is through the Airstream, not the Airflow. I'd like to see one shot from the "barrage of bad press from competitors". I've never seen any. I've searched Newspapers.com and could not find a single instance where a competitor disparaged the Airflow by name or any of its features.
There are ways of "knocking" a competitor's product by rumor and innuendo. Somebody started the story that the Airflow was a failure which was an exaggeration to put it mildly. I know I have seen a GM advertisement in which they inserted a wooden dowel into a steel tube then demonstrated that an empty steel tube was easier to crush and bend than the one with the dowel. This "proved" that the wood framed body was stronger than the flimsy all steel body. I can't find this ad but I did find Chrysler's response in which they emphasized their car's safety and even rolled one off a cliff to prove that the all steel body is not weak. I did find that one and here it is, they push the car off the cliff at 4:30. A year later GM was bragging in their ads about the superiority of their "all steel Turret-Top body". All of a sudden the all steel body was better - once they figured out how to make them. Here is another video in which they explain the design philosophy that led to the Airflow. They start with the streamline principle and go on to explain how they made the body roomier and lower while giving the passengers a more comfortable ride. As for whether the Airflow influenced car design, you only have to look at the typical 1932 or 1933 car, then look at the 1934 - 37 Airflow, then look at the typical car of 1938 and later to see they look an awful lot more like an Airflow than any previous car. You say the Chrysler 1938 models resemble the Airstream but to me they slowly evolved toward the Airflow ideal until by the early forties any resemblance to the 1933 car was gone. Even the grille and headlights were integrated into the body, Airflow style, and in profile the silhouette is pure Airflow and owes nothing to the boxy look of 1932 or 33. In any case there is not much point in arguing the merits of an 86 year old car. It's just another example of Chrysler copying General Motors ideas - 5 or 10 years before GM thought of them.
I was having trouble falling to sleep, but after reading this Chrysler versus ford versus chev slinging match I am having keeping my eyes open,,,,I thought this was a hotrod site not a restorers site,,, but for the mopar guys I’ve got a mate who has 3 good airflow bodies over here he can’t get rid of... pm me and I’ll send you details I’ll warn you though he is not a rodder but a mopar purist and thinks they are worth a lot more than they really are, for the aussies look on eBay for the REO bus guy,,,reading this post gone from interesting to 15 minutes of my life I’ll never get back, I usually don’t post anything negative but really,,,,, Sent from my iPhone using The H.A.M.B. mobile app
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